“It might leave something to be desired.”
“TSA couldn’t find the crack in their ass with a mirror.”
Babs smiled in spite of herself. “Well, there’s the crack in your ass, and then there’s the mirror,” she said.
“I hear stuff,” he admitted.
“What kind of stuff?” Babs asked.
Tommy shrugged. “I heard of a guy wants to smuggle a tractor-trailer load of smokes up from North Carolina,” he said.
“Useful, but not exactly what we’re looking for.”
“Hey, you wanted a for-instance.”
“For instance, what do you hear about an air cargo heist at JFK?”
“Give me a what, I might know a who,” he said.
So there it was. He had her in a fork. She had no choice but to spell it out. “A container shipment of 5.56 NATO. Going to Iraq. Somebody lost the manifest and made it disappear.”
“That’s some heavy lifting,” Tommy said.
“Somebody with more muscle than brains,” Beeks said. “Seem familiar?”
“I’d only be guessing, but my guess is probably the same as yours,” Tommy said. “Viktor Guzenko.”
No surprise there. Of the Russian gang lords, Guzenko was one of the most feared, both by the other ethnic crime families in Brighton Beach-even the Chechens, who weren’t scared of much-and by the older, more established New York mobs, Irish and Italian. Like the Jamaicans and the brutally violent MS-13, Guzenko settled his scores in blood. He was reported to have survived half-a-dozen assassination attempts by rivals and his own colleagues. If anybody was contemptuous of bringing down federal heat, Guzenko was your man. But it led nowhere. It was an educated guess, as Tommy had said.
“What can you find out?” Babs asked him.
“I’m not going to wear a wire,” Tommy said.
She looked at Beeks, surprised. Neither one of them had even thought to suggest it. Why so quick to say no to something they hadn’t put on the table?
“You think he’s blowing smoke?” Beeks asked her after they let Tommy go.
“Maybe he knows more than he’s ready to tell,” Babs said.
Of course, that was the impression Tommy wanted to leave. He’d played the cops before. They were always a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged.
The question was what to give.
Not that Tommy had much to offer. He’d been bluffing Babs, and he knew better than to try and bluff the Russians. He’d gotten away with it once, and nobody had read his handwriting in it, but he didn’t think he’d luck out a second time.
DiMello had given him the lead, though. He knew Brooklyn South would have already squeezed the guys working the terminal, and the feds would have put them through the wringer, too, but you couldn’t get blood from a stone. Tommy figured the cops had drawn a blank, or they wouldn’t be grasping at straws. Thing was, after 9/11, security had tightened up, but more often than not, the new procedures simply made everything more inconvenient and cumbersome. They didn’t address the underlying problem and served to create grievances. The union rank and file didn’t appreciate being taken to task for something that wasn’t in fact their responsibility. Background checks were already strict. The heightened clearance requirements made for bad blood. Loss of seniority because your next of kin came from Pakistan was one step away from a class-action lawsuit.
Tommy had the one arrow in his quiver. Either the cargo handlers knew nothing or they were unwilling to speculate. You didn’t give the FBI the loose end of a ball of yarn, not if you might be open to uncomfortable questions, none of which had dick to do with international terrorism, but you were vulnerable.
Tommy knew a bar in South Ozone. He took the subway out to Queens.
You spring for a round of draft beers, it’s an investment.
Jeremy Chapin, she found out, was now heading up ATF regional out of Phoenix. AIC, agent in charge, so on paper it was a promotion, but if you read the runes, it might just as easily be a career ender.
“Detective DiMello,” he said when Babs got him on the phone. “Good to hear from you.” He sounded as if he meant it, and Babs felt a little guilty, since she’d played an inadvertent part in getting him reassigned from the New York office.
“I’ve got a situation here,” she said. She told him about the Kennedy hijack. “There’s a Russian gangster named Guzenko who might have a piece of it, but nobody’s talking. They’re all either bought off or scared.”
“Georgian, actually,” Chapin said.
“Sorry?”
“Guzenko’s a Georgian, like Joe Stalin.”
“You know him?”
“Not personally, but I hear he’s a ruthless bastard.”
“Who can he sell to, that kind of volume?”
Chapin grunted. “I could point you at some guys,” he said. “Across the border from El Paso, the Juarez cartel.”
“Drug lords.”
“It’s a free-fire zone down there, you hadn’t heard. The gangs are whacking each other ten or a dozen a day. And there’s a lot of collateral damage, civilian casualties.”
“With all due respect, you’ve got a dog in the fight.”
“Sure, it’s my area of responsibility,” Chapin said. “But you’re not going to sell 5.56 NATO to the muj or the rebels in Chechnya. Weapon of choice in that neck of the woods is the AK, 7.62 Soviet. Down in Mexico, it’s the M4.”
The M4 was a slightly shortened configuration of the M16, U.S. military issue. “How come?” Babs asked him.
Chapin blew out his breath. “Think about the provenance,” he said. “Where do the cartels get their guns? They don’t have a source for Warsaw Pact surplus weapons.”
“Right,” she said, catching up. “They smuggle guns in from the U.S.”
“So yeah, I’ve got a dog in the fight,” he said. “All the border states, this is heavy traffic. The hot-button issue is illegals, but that’s bullshit. What comes north is drugs, what goes south is guns and money. You want a market for ammo? You could turn that stuff in forty-eight hours, cash money.”
“How do I get it there?”
“Label it plasma-screen TVs. How the hell do I know? All I know is, it slips through the cracks each and every day.”
“Big crack, for containerized cargo to fall through.”
There was a long hesitation on the Arizona end of the line.
She could picture him frowning. “Containerized?” he asked.
“Yeah, we’re talking a couple of million rounds.”
“What was it doing at JFK?”
“Waiting shipment.”
“No,” he said. “You ship containers by rail or sea. You can’t get something that size and weight on an aircraft, not even a C-5A Galaxy. A container would be across the river, at the docks in Jersey, or downstate, McGuire AFB. And it would be broken down into something manageable, thousand-pound pallets.”
“Not my information.”
“Either your information is mistaken or you’re looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope,” he said. “That container shouldn’t have been at Kennedy. It couldn’t be loaded as air freight.”
She studied the problem. “It would have come in by truck.”
“A semi could haul it. It could go out the same way.”
“Let me get back to you,” she said.
“Keep me in the loop,” Chapin said. He hung up.
He had Washington on speed dial, Babs figured. Maybe this was going to break open. ATF had resources she didn’t. Not that it mattered who made the case. Still, better if she stayed in front of the curve. The container. Where did that lead?
Xynergistics had good computer capacity, but nothing like the big arrays available to the intelligence community. Lydie Temple put her data together and ran it by her boss, and got his approval to forward the package to their NSA contact.
He e-mailed her back two hours later, which was way fast.